Post navigation

The kindness of strangers

My daughter was having a fit on the way to school yesterday. This is nothing new considering she’s two years old, so we continued walking down the path to the bus stop as if nothing was happening. After a minute it registered that someone was repeatedly yelling the command “wart!” (“wait!”) at me. One of the women who lives along the path came running out of her yard and handed my daughter a few plums that she’d just picked from the tree in her yard. My daughter immediately forgot that everything is wrong as she started to giggle and eat the plums.

I thanked the woman profusely and didn’t think anything more of it until we were walking up the same path on the way home from school in the afternoon. I heard the woman exclaim that “it’s that little girl from this morning” and, again, “wart!” This time she had her husband come around and give us a bag full of fresh plums. She also gave my children a couple to eat on the way home. Side note: if you ever hear someone claim that Austrians like dogs more than children (I’ve heard that lie countless times), remember this story.

Fresh from the tree

These little plums were so ripe that I was not convinced they would last until the next day, and I was also not convinced that my children would eat them. I decided that rather than eat them all myself (my first instinct), I’d make them into knödel (see my recipe for apricot knödel here). My husband was appreciative of the surprise dessert after dinner and miraculously, my kids ate their knödel and said they tasted good.